The principal as a key actor in promoting teachers’ innovativeness – analyzing the innovativeness of teaching staff with variance-based partial least square modeling

ABSTRACT

The study examines the correlation between collective innovativeness of the teaching staff and the principal’s leadership style as well as additional school structure characteristics. The construct of collective innovativeness is examined as a precondition of successful school improvement processes driven by the teaching staff. Based on theoretical interdisciplinary analyses and empirical findings, the examined hypothesis was that the principal’s leadership directly and positively influences the collective innovativeness of the teaching staff. The results of the structural equation modeling (partial least squares regression) indicate that the principal’s leadership style is the strongest predictor of teachers’ collective innovativeness and, together with the teaching staff’s perception of hierarchical structures and autonomy within the school, explained 51% of variance in the construct. The paper highlights important aspects of principals’ leadership styles that can encourage collective innovativeness among teachers.

KEYWORDS:

• School improvement
• teacher innovativeness
• principals’ leadership
• educational reform

Acknowledgement

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 28th International Congress for School Effectiveness and Improvement, Cincinnati, OH, USA, January 2015.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Psychologically motivational characteristics of individual teachers were not considered in this study.

2. In sociology, social actions and social processes can be explained from an action-theoretical perspective, on the one hand, and from the perspective of structural theory, on the other hand. Both perspectives focus on different aspects in their explanation. In this paper, the joint actions of the teaching staff are viewed from the perspective of structural theory and therefore as being determined by elements of institutions. In accordance with the basic idea of neo-institutionalism, it is assumed that agents must actively process institutional guidelines (Hasse & Krücken, 2005, pp. 70–72). In this paper, the different types of institutions are applied to the individual school.

3. The research project was officially entitled “Wirksamkeit einer bildungspolitischen Reformstrategie im öffentlichen (Berufs-)Schulwesen”.

4. Most vocational schools in Berlin are centers for upper secondary education, starting at Grade 11 and offering different training programs grouped according to occupational fields (e.g., business and administration, electrical engineering, social services).

5. The construct was specified according to (a) the relation between first-order latent variables and their indicators and (b) the relation between second-order latent variables and first-order variables (see Becker et al., 2012; Jarvis et al., 2003; Ringle et al., 2012).

6. In the language of PLS-based approaches, the concept commonly referred to as measurement model (or structure model) is referred to as outer model (and inner model, respectively) (Weiber & Mühlhaus, 2010, p. 254).

7. Sample item: “I would like to commit myself highly for changes/innovations.”

8. Sample item: “At our school, there are organizational improvement objectives which determine the planning of my own pedagogical work.”

9. Sample item: “Our teaching staff does not endeavor much towards innovation and improvements regarding organizational issues of the school.”

10. See Table 5. As PLS-based approaches offer no indications regarding significance, statements on significance can be made by means of bootstrapping (see Weiber & Mühlhaus, 2010, p. 255) and t values.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) [ZL 53/1-1].

Notes on contributors

Ramona Buske

Ramona Buske is a research associate at the Chair of Business and Economics Education of Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, Germany. She has worked in various projects on higher education teaching and quality improvement in schools and higher education. Her current focus is on organizational and school improvement and reform implementation.